The Media and The Public: "Them" and "Us" in Media Discourse »

Stephen Coleman is Professor of Political Communication and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Citizenship, Institute for Communications Studies, University of Leeds. He is the author of The Internet and Democratic Citizenship: Theory, Practice, and Policy (with Jay G. Blumler, 2009) and Public Trust in the News: A Constructivist Study of the Social Life of News (with David Morrison and Scott Anthony, 2009).

Karen Ross is Professor of Media and Public Communication at the University of Liverpool. She has written and edited many books, including Gendered Media: Women, Men and Identity Politics (2009), Popular Communication: Essays on Publics, Practices and Processes (2008), Rethinking Media Education: Critical Pedagogy and Identity Politics (2007), and Women and Media: Critical Issues (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006).

The Media and the Public explores the ways a range of media, from the press to television to the Internet, has constructed and represented the public. Stephen Coleman and Karen Ross argue that the public is always a product of representation, that there is no a priori public that is captured or recorded by the media. Instead, the public is invoked through processes of mediation that are dominated by political, institutional, economic, and cultural forces. Twenty-first century publics witness themselves more than any public in history – in vox pops, phone-ins, studio-audience discussions, soap opera dramatizations, reality TV formats, and beyond – but they do not control their own image. Mediated publics are vulnerable to misrepresentation by media images that fail to reflect their diversity and complexity. Through an exploration of citizen journalism, street newspapers, participatory media, online public consultations, and the blogosphere, Stephen Coleman and Karen Ross identify a more comprehensive and diverse set of public voices who are using media outlets to speak for themselves.

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Them and us: Meet Joe the Plumber

1. Imagining the public

2. Public spheres

3. The managed public

4. Counterpublics and alternative media

5. Virtual publicness

6. Fractured publics, contested publicness

Notes

Bibliography